BlackBerry Cool says it has some inside info that the 8820 is launching without GPS support, and we've heard other rumors that say WiFi support will only work with a purchased data plan. Everyone seems hell bent on pinning this one on some sort of Apple headed conspiracy, to which we reply, "Pshyeah, right." AT&T has been moving more toward the "Verizon-esque" method of crippling phones, and we're sure the nuked GPS isn't some sort of half-baked conspiracy, but rather AT&T trying to push their average revenue per user up.
Let's say you're sick of AT&T's shenannigans, and have a plane ticket to Hong Kong, $750 extra bucks and aren't scared of bricking your iPhone... you, friend, are a candidate for unlocking an iPhone. While we're pretty sure the hack isn't any different than the TurboSIM hack floating around for a few weeks, the company says people wanting to get their hands on an iPhone with the carrier of their choice can buy an unlocked iPhone for $2000, or bring an extra iPhone for $750. We're into unlocked iPhones and everything, but we, nor any rational human being, should be able to justify $2000 or even $1250 on an unlocked iPhone.
Over at CatCubed, an avid iPhoneer has posted a howto on a seemingly complete solution for syncing email between his mac, his iPhone and his GMail. He's created a way to track which emails he's read, and also auto archive everything to his much larger 2 GB of Gmail storage. If you're looking to understand, in depth, what happens both behind the scenes and on the iPhone, check out his tutorial.
Do the letters LTV1 ring a bell? Probably not, unless you're an AT&T customer service rep, but AT&T gives deals to those it considers to be a "long term value." If you're rated as an LTV1... you're not going to get any deals on equipment, but if you've got less than 12 months on your contract, you might be able to get out of it without an early termination fee.
The revelations likely aren't a surprise to anyone whose dialed 411 on their mobile phone, but now the complete details behind AT&T's customer retention strategies are available on the Consumerist. Other sections we found particularly noteworthy? We'd heard rumors before of using too many off network calls to get out of a contract, but now the practice seems to be documented. We've already seen Sprint shudder some of its worst customers in favor of cutting support costs, and now we have confirmation that AT&T isn't actively trying to keep every customer either; one can only assume this is an industry trend. We'll be interested to see if someone picks up on these "high maintenance" customers and creates a mobile service specifically for them, or if they'll just keep getting bumped from carrier to carrier.
The HTC Kaiser, aka AT&T's soon-to-be Tilt, made some face time over on YouTube, and for people who haven't exactly seen the slide-and-tilt wonder in action, hit the YouTube video above for a demo. We kinda figure the Tilt would force itself into a Tilt, but as the video shows, the slide out form-factor makes it more akin to the 8525 until you... well... tilt it up. Rumors say the device will hit September 3rd for $499 with a two-year contract, so your wait is almost over Tilt-a-holics.
It seems as though Verizon, Sprint and AT&T all want a piece of the MotorolaRAZR2 pie, as dangerous as such a pastry sounds. The RAZR2 has a giant external screen, which is great, since reading the PR statements would lead you to believe it was the best multimedia device ever. AT&T statement was the only one to contain any real info, which claimed the RAZR2 would have 3G support; everyone else just echoed the phone's specs. The phone hasn't been released by anyone yet, but you can pick it up from Verizon for $299.99 (after a rebate), from AT&T for $299.99, and from Sprint for $249.99. You can read more from each company here: AT&T, Sprint, Verizon.
It's been a busy day for the Motorola RAZR2 V9: AT&T, Verizon and Sprint all announced that they will be offering the next-gen RAZR handset to their customers in September. You'll find the details of who is offering what version, and how much for below. We've added T-Mobile to this chart as well, just in case they decide to join the fun in the near future...
Carrier
Model offered
Price (with 2-year contract
Mail-in Rebate
Final Price
Description
Radios
Processor
Battery Size
Video capture
Verizon
V9m
$349.99
$50
$299.99
" Features External Display and Touch-Sensitive Keys and Bluetooth Support"
Dual-band CDMA, EVDO
225MHz
770 mAh
15fps, 320 x 240
AT&T
V9
$299.99
None
$299.99
"quad-band world phone that allows users to travel abroad "
The intrpid Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo has been trying the iPhone SIM card unlocking hack that we covered here, and has found that it works, but only sometimes. He was able to use it to enable one SIM to work with a non-AT&T network, but not others. Part of the problem is that the technique only works with the older Version 1 SIMs; many networks have now switched over to the Version 2 and Version 3 SIMs, which use a more complex encryption method to stop this sort of thing. Needless to say, the hackers behind the first hack are continuing their explorations to find ways around this. This hack is unlikely to work in the US: all of the carriers switched over to the more secure Version 2 and 3 SIMs several years ago.
The iPhone hacking app iFuntastic just got a version bump, with version 2.5.0 adding the ability to browse the iPhone's internal filing system. That's a big plus if you're nosey about what's going on inside your iPhone, but it doesn't allow for full control yet. You can copy files off the device, replace images and sounds, but you can't create or copy new files over to it yet. We've tried it out and found that it works as advertised; you can poke around the internals of iPhone, edit files and do all sorts of things that Apple probably won't approve of (and which could portentially crash your iPhone, so proceed with caution). Unfortunately, it remains a Mac only app, and will only run on Intel Macs; Windows and PowerPC Mac users will have to look elsewhere for their iPhone hacking thrills. Click on Read More for some of the interesting things we have found when poking around inside our iPhone...
Are you sick of your BlackBerry owning friends crowing about their ability to view spreadsheets, word documents and the like? Well, with a quick hack, you can do the same, and then boast about how your screen is bigger and you can see more of the document at once. And then you can crow about how you can zoom in on the document by pinching, see more of a document by rotating your iPhone and generally be cooler than them. Click on Read More for the details...
It's another step on the road to unlocking the iPhone to work with carriers other than AT&T; the hackers at the iPhone Dev Wiki have managed to gain access to the code that runs the radio baseband chip. This is the piece of silicon that communicates with the cell phone network, and somewhere in this code are the instructions that tell the iPhone to refuse to talk to any network other than AT&T, so this is a huge step on the way to unlocking the iPhone. Once they understand how this works, they can start to look at ways round it, hopefully eventually leading to a way to unlock the iPhone.
In this new series of blog posts, we are going to show you how to hack your iPhone, ranging from complex hacks that change the way it works, to simple hacks that make it easier to use. For starters, here's how to activate a new iPhone without signing up with AT&T. Click on Read More to see the whole procedure...
We noticed that the AT&T (AKA Cingular) EDGE network was down this morning; we were unable to browse the web on EDGE-enabled phones in our office near Boston. AT&T confirmed that they had an outage, starting at around 11:45AM EST, but claimed that it was fixed quickly; Cingular spokesperson Brad Mays told us that "some of our EDGE wireless data customers around the country had been experiencing difficulties using this wireless data network. Voice calling was unaffected".
We noticed that EDGE was once again active at around 2:30 PM EST. Did you notice the outage? Let us know in the comments...
So we (and the rest of the cell phone blogging world) had a few hours to experiment with the iPhone update that was released last night. Here's the highlights of what has been discovered so far:
The update does not add any new features to the iPhone. Hopefully, Apple is working on another update (perhaps version 1.1) which will add some of the more commonly requested features. You can vote on what you would like to see here.
There have been several minor fixes to programs such as YouTube, where the most viewed videos list for today is now properly updated. - The field test mode still works.
The update takes the firmware to version 03.14.08_G, up from version 03.12.06_G. Apple has not fixed the misspelling of firmware in the test mode menu, though (it's sill spelt as "firware").
Many iPhones that were hacked with programs like iFuntastic had problems installing the update, requiring the iPhone to be reinitialized from scratch, which involves downloading and reinstalling the firmware completely.
However, hacking programs that use the Jailbreak exploit still work when the update is applied; we were able to jailbreak an updated phone and change the carrier logo, add ringtones, etc. So, if the update deletes all of your hacks, you can still go in and reinstall them.
There is a complete list of everything that has been updated here
We've seen reports of faster, smoother web browsing in Safari, but our own experience doesn't bear this out; the speed seems to be the same, and we haven't noticed any more or less crashes. We are investigating further, and will be reporting more on this later on.
J. D. Power and Associates has just released their study on the quality of customer service for major wireless companies. It seems that customer service quality is on the increase. Only 28% of customers with service problems contacted their carrier, down from the 48% reported in the last study. Of those who did call, 81% stated their claims were addressed in a timely manner, a 6% increase over the past three years. J.D. deduced that call quality issues have improved, as well as overall customer service.
T-Mobile again topped the list for overall customer satisfaction, followed by AT&T, VzW, Alltel and Sprint in that order. The margins between each company were far from staggering, as T-Mobile and Sprint were only separated by 16 points. Astute readers will notice that Amp'd Mobile was left off this list. As you very well know, WirelessInfo.com is all about thorough testing, so we did our own survey to try and fill in J.D.'s oversight. Our results showed an odd dichotomy. Amp'd users were dissatisfied with their service being canceled on the 31st, but incredibly satisfied with the Amp'd "optional bill payment" policy*.
So after the roller coaster ride that Apple stockholders have enjoyed the last couple of days lets look a little closer at the numbers. AT&T reported on Tuesday that they activated 146,000 iPhones. This sent Apple stock plummeting as it fell short of the somewhat ridiculous expectations of analysts that ran as high as 500,000 phones sold. Apple came out the next day and announced that they had sold 270,000 iPhones in the first 30 hours, a figure almost 85% higher than AT&T's activations number. The speculation on why the discrepancy existed has gone far afield, as some argue that a combination of activation problems and people seeking to sell the phone on Ebay might be the issues. Although we're sure that both of these items contributed, the truth is that there is no way that there were 124,000 activation problems + disappointed ebay sellers. People seem to be missing the obvious reason for the discrepancy, online sales. Phones sold through Apple's online store during the period would obviously not be activated by AT&T as buyers would not receive them for at least a week, if not longer. Although we understand that its fun to whine about activation problems and speculate about how broken hearted Ebay sellers were, lets have some common sense here.
Apple has just released their second quarter earnings report, and amongst the details released is a figure for the number of iPhones sold; 270,000. Although this is well off from the figures that Analysts were quoting (of over half a million), bear in mind that this is for only one quarter, which ended on the 30th. So that's 270,000 iPhones sold in about 1 day, and 146,000 iPhones activated. Why the difference between the two? There are two reasons; the difficulty that many users had activating their iPhones, and the fact that a lot of users bought their iPhones and then waited to activate them. Many users weren't able to activate their iPhones because of the problems that AT&T experienced, and many were waiting for numbers to be ported from other networks, or were waiting for contracts with other providers to end.
It's earnings season, and straight out of AT&T's earnings call, AT&T reported 146,000 iPhone subscribers activated their phones on June 29th and 30th. Apple investors seem less than pleased, as the stock is down $3.90 right now, but putting it in context, the broader indices are down across the board.
AT&T, also competing for "most text messages in a quarter" took the crown from previously announced winner, Verizon, almost doubling their text message total. AT&T says its subscribers sent an astounding 18 billion messages, and 270 mms messages. Take that "the network!"
We noticed last week that we'd become somewhat of an iPhone centric blog. Sure, the iPhone is great, but now we've taken a few days off of reporting every little twist and turn in the iPhone saga an instead bring back iHype. Today, the iPhone now runs third party apps, plus off-the-shelf iPhones are succeptible to some pretty invasive hacks, and how much is AT&T giving back to Apple for that locked-phone goodness?
Wow, while we can't confirm the news, sounds like someone in the UK is actually using an iPhone over Vodaphone's network. Essentially the user used the previous iAsign exploit to unlock the phone from using the bundled SIM card from AT&T (a feat we documented a few days ago.) The user then replaced the SIM with another AT&T SIM that just happened to work with Vodaphone, and Voila!
The user says Visual Voicemail doesn't work, which makes sense, but all other services work. The phone still has the AT&T logo in the upper left corner, but regardless, some progress toward unlocking the iPhone. Good news for UK residents on importing the phone too.
Word on the street is we'll see HTC's Kaiser replacing AT&T's 8525 as the 8925 pretty soon. The Kaiser, if you're not up to your HTC internal name scheme, is the slide-and-tilt successor to phones like Hermes and Titan (AT&T's own 8125/8525, and Sprint's Mogul.) Some are reporting it'll hit in August 2007, but we, like many other mobile phone sites, don't think AT&T would risk dampening the iPhone's appeal so soon, but rather a September / October date seems more likely. Regardless, HSDPA and a hefty 128MB ram upgrade are on the way as well as Windows Mobile 6 to eat up the extra ram.
Looks like the walls around the iPhone are beginning to crumble; the clever hackers at the iPhone dev Wiki have just created a new tool that they claim allows the iPhone to be used with a non-iPhone AT&T SIM. The hackers also speculate that this should work with virtual networks which use AT&Ts network, but they have not tested that yet. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is a significant step on the way to unlocking the iPhone.
Their new tool is called iASign, and what it does is to create a special file that helps to activate the iPhone, based on some details that the user supplies to the tool (such as the unique Device ID and the IMEI code). however, the process is complex, and shouldn't be approached lightly; as we found when we tried adding ringtones, it is rather easy to cause problems by making mistakes when you are hacking the internals of a complex device like the iPhone.
More madness from the crazy Canucks at RIM, as they (expectedly) unveil their first BlackBerry supporting WiFi, the 8820. The GSM phone sounds like a typical 8800 series BlackBerry, what with the full QWERTY keyboard and whatnot, but this BlackBerry is more than just WiFi, it rocks built-in GPS, microSDHC slot (supporting cards up to 32GB), but notably missing from their press release is mention of a camera. We're not sure whether that's on purpose or not, but the thought of using WiFi with UMA kind of makes up for it. Nothing screams "awesome" like using your home WiFi network to make calls, and while AT&T hasn't formally announced their UMA plans, we don't think it'd be too much to speculate they'd be releasing some sort of plans in the coming weeks. RIM says the 8820 will hit AT&T before the summer is out.
We realize videos of kids using iPhones have been circulating around, but how cool is it that even a one-year-old understands the photo UI? Check the vid for cuteness factor overload.
Washington State Supreme Court ruled against AT&T (formerly Cingular Wireless) saying arbitration clauses in cell phone contracts violate the Consumer Protection Act. Typically arbitration agreements are in the fine print of any cellphone contract and take away the customer's right to create class action lawsuits. Originally, Cingular customers were suing over a roaming charge dispute. When the class-action suit was filed, Cingular tried to block it, citing their arbitration clause.
According to the case, each individual consumer was being overcharged by anywhere from a buck to $40. Now, individually this is utterly insignificant and wouldn't be worth bringing to court, but on the whole, Cingular Wireless overcharged the public by quite a large margin. This situation is a textbook reason why class-action lawsuits exist: to protect the public from corporate nickel-&-dime theft.
Even though the suit itself is still unresolved, this ruling will undoubtedly be a watershed case for business ethics; just because the clause was standard doesn't mean it was ethical. As Cingular was bought out after this suit had been filed, we were left wondering if AT&T had the foresight to factor this PR nightmare into the dealmaking process. Regardless, looks like AT&T married itself to the problem, and now they might have to pay up.
We told you earlier about the iPhone hack to add custom ringtone support to the device, and now we've gone and hacked it ourselves. The result? Custom ringtones, but we did screw up our second attempt since we sent an old configuration file to the device. All in all, we did end up succeeding without further compromising the phone. Check out the video embedded below:
Yesterday, a YouTube Video of a guy putting a custom ringtone on the iPhone started spreading around the interwebs, and now you too can put your own ringtones on your $600 wonderPhone. HackTheIphone details a 23 step process for bricking customizing your iPhone. Fortunately for you adventuresome warriors out there, HackTheiPhone reports everyone who's tried has successfully restored their iPhone using iTunes, so while we can't endorse such wholesome hackery, it might be worth a shot. We'll try to convince our resident iPhone maven, Alfredo, to let us brick customize his personal iPhone and report back, that is if we can get past his iron-clad grip on his new baby.
Oh yeah, and this hack is for Intel-Mac users only, so if you're wholly subscribed to the gospel of Jobs, or haven't repurchased hardware in the last six months, you're out of luck.
The results of our iPhone battery survey seem to indicate that the issue of the battery icon not showing a full charge is widespread: over 60% of those who responded told us that their battery indicator did not show a fully charged battery. So, we contacted Apple PR about this, and they told us that "Your battery is fully charged, but the UI (User Interface) is just not correctly reflecting this. We expect to fix this in a software update."
Apple declined to say when the software update would be issued, and told us that Apple has not yet published any information on this bug; we hope that both will be forthcoming soon.
We are still running tests to determine if this issue is really just a bug, but our early results seem to indicates they may be correct. After an intense series of charging/discharging sessions, the problem batteries on our test iPhones seem to be lasting for longer periods, so this may have been an issue with the batteries requiring some conditioning before they could hold a full charge. We'll report further on this after a few more tests. You can read more about the iPhone battery issues that we found here.
Want to take a look at what's going on inside your iPhone? Dial *3001#12345#* and hit Call and you'll get access to the special field test mode of the iPhone. This mode is designed to allow technicians and Apple reps to get information on the inner workings of the iPhone and the cell phone network it talks to. If you want to find out more about the information it shows, click on read more.
Samsung and AT&T rolled out a new phone for the budget concious consumer and sure, it doesn't look like much, but at least it doesn't cost much either. The quad band wonder has Bluetooth, a VGA camera and some speakerphone love. Phones don't get much cheaper, as the SGH-A437 costs $69. The phone is available now and comes in Red, Gold and Grey colors.
Let's say you're sick of AT&T's shenannigans, and have a plane ticket to Hong Kong, $750 extra bucks and aren't scared of bricking your iPhone... you, friend, are a candidate for unlocking an iPhone. While we're pretty sure the hack isn't any different than the TurboSIM hack floating around for a few weeks, the company says people wanting to get their hands on an iPhone with the carrier of their choice can buy an unlocked iPhone for $2000, or bring an extra iPhone for $750. We're into unlocked iPhones and everything, but we, nor any rational human being, should be able to justify $2000 or even $1250 on an unlocked iPhone.
Over at CatCubed, an avid iPhoneer has posted a howto on a seemingly complete solution for syncing email between his mac, his iPhone and his GMail. He's created a way to track which emails he's read, and also auto archive everything to his much larger 2 GB of Gmail storage. If you're looking to understand, in depth, what happens both behind the scenes and on the iPhone, check out his 
Do the letters LTV1 ring a bell? Probably not, unless you're an AT&T customer service rep, but AT&T gives deals to those it considers to be a "long term value." If you're rated as an LTV1... you're not going to get any deals on equipment, but if you've got less than 12 months on your contract, you might be able to get out of it without an early termination fee. 
It seems as though 
The intrpid Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo has been trying the iPhone SIM card unlocking hack that we covered 
The iPhone hacking app iFuntastic just got a version bump, with 
Are you sick of your BlackBerry owning friends crowing about their ability to view spreadsheets, word documents and the like? Well, with a quick hack, you can do the same, and then boast about how your screen is bigger and you can see more of the document at once. And then you can crow about how you can zoom in on the document by pinching, see more of a document by rotating your iPhone and generally be cooler than them. Click on Read More for the details...
It's another step on the road to unlocking the iPhone to work with carriers other than AT&T; the hackers at the iPhone Dev Wiki have managed to gain access to the code that runs the radio baseband chip. This is the piece of silicon that communicates with the cell phone network, and somewhere in this code are the instructions that tell the iPhone to refuse to talk to any network other than AT&T, so this is a huge step on the way to unlocking the iPhone. Once they understand how this works, they can start to look at ways round it, hopefully eventually leading to a way to unlock the iPhone.
In this new series of blog posts, we are going to show you how to hack your iPhone, ranging from complex hacks that change the way it works, to simple hacks that make it easier to use. For starters, here's how to activate a new iPhone without signing up with AT&T. Click on Read More to see the whole procedure...
The update takes the firmware to version 03.14.08_G, up from version 03.12.06_G. Apple has not fixed the misspelling of firmware in the test mode menu, though (it's sill spelt as "firware"). 
J. D. Power and Associates
So after the roller coaster ride that Apple stockholders have enjoyed the last couple of days lets look a little closer at the numbers. AT&T reported on Tuesday that they activated 146,000 iPhones. This sent Apple stock plummeting as it fell short of the somewhat ridiculous expectations of analysts that ran as high as 500,000 phones sold. Apple came out the next day and announced that they had sold 270,000 iPhones in the first 30 hours, a figure almost 85% higher than AT&T's activations number. The speculation on why the discrepancy existed has gone far afield, as some argue that a combination of activation problems and people seeking to sell the phone on Ebay might be the issues. Although we're sure that both of these items contributed, the truth is that there is no way that there were 124,000 activation problems + disappointed ebay sellers. People seem to be missing the obvious reason for the discrepancy, online sales. Phones sold through Apple's online store during the period would obviously not be activated by AT&T as buyers would not receive them for at least a week, if not longer. Although we understand that its fun to whine about activation problems and speculate about how broken hearted Ebay sellers were, lets have some common sense here.
We noticed last week that we'd become somewhat of an iPhone centric blog. Sure, the iPhone is great, but now we've taken a few days off of reporting every little twist and turn in the iPhone saga an instead bring back iHype. Today, the iPhone now runs third party apps, plus off-the-shelf iPhones are succeptible to some pretty invasive hacks, and how much is AT&T giving back to Apple for that locked-phone goodness?
Word on the street is we'll see 
Looks like the walls around the iPhone are beginning to crumble; the clever hackers at the iPhone dev Wiki have just created a new tool that they claim allows the iPhone to be used with a non-iPhone AT&T SIM. The hackers also speculate that this should work with virtual networks which use AT&Ts network, but they have not tested that yet. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is a significant step on the way to unlocking the iPhone. 
More madness from the crazy Canucks at RIM, as they (
Washington State Supreme Court ruled against 
The results of our 
Want to take a look at what's going on inside your iPhone? Dial *3001#12345#* and hit Call and you'll get access to the special field test mode of the iPhone. This mode is designed to allow technicians and Apple reps to get information on the inner workings of the iPhone and the cell phone network it talks to. If you want to find out more about the information it shows, click on read more. 